This blog discusses the historical reliability of the Bible, the creation/evolution debate and apologetics in general.

Friday, 16 August 2013

3,000-Year-Old Text Refutes Sceptical Views on Ancient Israelites

Caravaggio: David and Goliath (ca. 1599). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

Sceptics tend to claim that the Bible cannot describe historical events accurately because they believe that ancient Israelites could not write.

This, however, has become an untenable approach as archaeologists have in recent years dug up ancient artefacts with writing on them.

Recently, Fox News featured a programme on a 3,000-year old text that archaeologist Eilat Mazar's team found last year near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Acceding to an article accompanying programme,

“If Hebrew as a written language existed in the 10th century … the ancient Israelites were recording their history in real time as opposed to writing it down several hundred years later. That would make the Old Testament an historical account of real-life events.”

The article suggests that ancient Israelites lived in Jerusalem earlier than scholars had previously assumed. Douglas Petrovich, an expert on Near Eastern history, told Fox News that the discovery indicates that Hebrew-speakers lived near Jerusalem at the time of David and Solomon.